Introducing the new ICO!

Hi!

As a relatively new starter to the ICO team (I joined around nine months ago) I’m very excited to be the one pulling the curtain on a few big changes we’re doing at the agency that we wanted to share with you all who know and follow us. Today we’re super thrilled to be announcing a full rebranding, doubling our focus down on helping studios worldwide self-publish their games and our new vision for the future of ICO and what we do.

But first, a bit of context. ICO Partners has been running for twelve years now, first established by Thomas and Diane as a videogames consulting agency helping asian and american companies set up shop in Europe. Fast forward to today, we’ve grown to a fully fledged videogames agency, with hundreds of clients on our portfolio, having helped launch world-renowned brands like Riot’s League Of Legends, Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering Arena or Hi-Rez Studios’ SMITE.

We are also lucky to have helped lots of small and medium sized companies, indie studios and publishers get their games seen and talked about. We have met many friends, found our expertise and participated in many industry-wide initiatives, events and talks. To everyone who’s been a partner in all these years, we say a big thank you!

But after twelve years it was time to stop, look at our past and our future and reimagine our processes, approach and company mission, vision and values. The aim was to clearly define what we do, who we are and what we care most about. To this end, last year we took some time to reflect on and crystalize a new vision for ICO.

The outcome of those discussions are a series of progressive changes that we’ve already started putting in place, and today is the time to share them publicly:

• A new ICO.
  We are moving from ICO Partners to just ICO, and giving our identity a completely fresh look. This comes with two new websites (one about us, another one about our current clients), a new Medium blog and revamped social media presence, which have been long overdue.
• A new mission: To unlock our clients self-publishing potential.
  Big game studio making a AAA game-as-service or two-team independent developer, our mission is to help teams of all sizes get their games out, seen and enjoyed by players worldwide.
• Three areas of focus
  Moving forward we are focusing on three areas of work to support our partners: Communications (PR, Social Media, Influencer Marketing), Business Intelligence and Marketing, all of them at a European level. Broadly speaking this doesn’t change much but at a company level it helps us define very clearly what we do and communicate it better.

A neat summary

• Broadening the scope on each area
  On Communications, we’ve added Influencer Marketing and Social Media to our suite of services. On Business Intelligence, we are widening our crowdfunding and our historical online game consulting missions and working to support the strategic needs of our partners. On Marketing, we’re looking to ramp up efforts on creative services, localization, sourcing, production, networking, event support and more.
• Launching a new weekly newsletter.
  As part of our new activities we are launching a new weekly newsletter for journalists and games industry professionals. This one will collect all the new games released on the Nintendo Switch store in the previous 7 days and deliver it every week to your email in an easy to digest format. This one is built on the back of our Steam newsletter, which has been running for a while.

Want to know what’s being released on Nintendo Switch every week? Got you covered

• We’ve been growing!
  We are now a team of eleven, but we are still working from a central office in Brighton here in the UK. We’ve also taken on board several new partners we’re very happy to work with!

Some of the titles we’ve been working on lately. Some you might recognize!

• Now on Medium
  We are moving our blog to Medium, all the previous content is still available at icopartners.com/blog, but moving forward we’ll be calling this space our home.
• Delivering on our mission by leveraging our expertise and tools.
  Expertise can be a bit of a loaded word, but we have a top team with many many years of individual experience in the games industry and we’re proud about it. We strive to share this expertise with our friends and partners and help them get where they want to be.

These past few months have been busy, and we have had to adjust to the current circumstances, with the full team now working remotely. Luckily for us the games industry is very well positioned to help people during these strange times and we’re very proud to be assisting our partners to deliver entertainment and fun to people worldwide.

Wrapping things up, we’re very much open for business so if you have a game and need help or want to get help with industry data, please reach out. On the other hand, if you are a journalist or content creator please register with us so we can get you our communications and opportunities regularly.

Also, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletters if you want to check out the latest games on Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Thanks for reading!